As we celebrate charts, we might send analytic birthday greetings to a man who drew epoch-making maps of a very different sort, Sigismund Schlomo Freud; he was born on this date in 1856. The father of psychoanalysis, he revolutionized the field of psychotherapy– so much so that later practitioners have often failed to recognize Freud’s scientific predecessors. Throughout his work (in such books as Interpretation of Dreams and the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) he emphasized the role of unconscious and non-rational functioning, going against most contemporary thought by suggesting that dreams and “mistakes” may have affirmative meaning.

The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation for how it arises from physical states of the brain, we are not even sure whether we ever will. Astronomers wonder what dark matter is, geologists seek the origins of life, and biologists try to understand cancer—all difficult problems, of course, yet at least we have some idea of how to go about investigating them and rough conceptions of what their solutions could look like. Our first-person experience, on the other hand, lies beyond the traditional methods of science. Following the philosopher David Chalmers, we call it the hard problem of consciousness.

But perhaps consciousness is not uniquely troublesome. Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally hard, problem of matter. What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics? This problem, too, seems to lie beyond the traditional methods of science, because all we can observe is what matter does, not what it is in itself—the “software” of the universe but not its ultimate “hardware.” On the surface, these problems seem entirely separate. But a closer look reveals that they might be deeply connected…

As we think, therefore are, we might send analytic birthday greetings to Sigismund Schlomo Freud; he was born on this date in 1856. The father of psychoanalysis, he revolutionized the field of psychotherapy– so much so that later practitioners have often failed to recognize Freud’s scientific predecessors. Throughout his work (in such books as Interpretation of Dreams and the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) he emphasized the role of unconscious and non-rational functioning, going against most contemporary thought by suggesting that dreams and “mistakes” may have affirmative meaning.

A two-minute look at demographics, habits, living conditions, and more if only 100 people lived on Earth in the same cultural and social patterns as the 7.4 billion who actually do:

[Happily, while most of the info here check out as solid, the poverty numbers in this video seem to be based on data from around 2012; things have got better since then: if 15 people in 100 spent $US1.90 a day or less in 2012, by 2015 that number was down to 10. Back in 1981, according to World Bank data, the corresponding number was over 40.]

* Shakespeare, Hamlet

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As we note that “it takes a village,” we might send carefully-observed birthday greetings to Gabriel Tarde; he was born on this date in 1843. A French sociologist, criminologist, and social psychologist, he conceived society as based on small psychological interactions (“intermental activity”) among individuals (much as if it were chemistry), the fundamental forces being imitation and innovation.

While this theory of social interaction– which emphasized the individual in an aggregate of persons– brought Tarde into conflict with Émile Durkheim (who conceived of society as a collective unity), Tarde had an formative influence on the thinking of psychologists and social theorists from Sigmund Freud to Everett Rogers. Now, for all his sins, Tarde seems to be in process of being re-discovered as a harbinger of postmodern French theory, particularly as influenced by the social philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Like this:

For much of recorded history the human body was a black box—a highly capable yet mysterious assemblage of organs, muscles and bones. Even Hippocrates, a man who declared anatomy to be the foundation of medicine, had some interestingideas about our insides.

By the early Renaissance, scientists and artists were chipping away at this anatomical inscrutability, and illustration was proving a particularly effective way to spread what was being learned via human dissection. There remained one nagging issue, however: accurately representing the body’s three-dimensional structure on a flat, two-dimensional piece of paper. Some artists relied on creative uses of perspective to solve the problem. Others began using flaps…

As we peek inside, we might send verbose birthday greetings to Josef Breuer; he was born on this date in 1842. A physician, he made key discoveries in neurophysiology. His work in the 1880s with his patient Bertha Pappenheim, known as Anna O., developed the talking cure (cathartic method) and laid the foundation to psychoanalysis as developed by his protégé, Sigmund Freud.

(Though Breuer’s treatment of Anna O. was not nearly as successful as he and Freud claimed, she eventually overcame her symptoms to become an innovative social worker and a leader of the women’s movement in Germany.)

University College London proudly displays the remains of one of its founders, the Father of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham. They’re also anxious to display his works… but they comprise 60,000 manuscript folios– lots of handwriting to transcribe. The college has been at it since 1959, and the going has been slow– until relatively recently:

The genesis of Transcribe Bentham was in 2009, when the Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Melissa Terras, was asked by the head of the Bentham Project, Professor Philip Schofield, for advice on procuring funding to digitise the 60,000 folios. “The days for getting funding for pure ‘scan and dump’ digitisation projects are over,” explains Terras, “and I wondered if we could do something more interesting.”

Around the same time, the MPs expenses scandal had broken in the UK, and Terras noticed something interesting: “The Guardian newspaper had built a platform to allow their readers to sift through the thousands of pages of MP’s receipts and I wondered — could we do the same? Could we ask people to read these manuscripts?”

The answer is a definite “yes.” Transcribe Bentham has been a certifiable success, and continues to grow in scale. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, the project has now expanded to encompass the British Library’s collection of 12,500 manuscript folios by Bentham…

As the digitization has proceeded– in many cases, the first reading of Bentham’s scrawls– some interesting discoveries have been made; the exploration has shed new light, for instance of his stance on animal rights. But perhaps most surprisingly, volunteer readers have discovered a tranche of recipes (complete with the costs of their ingredients) from the great thinker. An excerpt from the manuscript page above:

1/2 lb—
The husks of ripe
walnuts at the time
They separate most
easily from the walnut
& before they begin
to rot—
6 tb — 1d
Salt 1 tb 1
Labour 1/2
21/2

Pound the husks adding the salt when they are nearly bruised into an uniform mass so that it may be perfectly mixed. This & all other pickles must be kept in close vessels, casks headed down, jars with bladder tied over the mouth, or cloth or paper covered with melted pitch &c. When a stone vessel is opened it should be emptied into smaller ones, so that no more than sufficient for two or three weeks consumption may be put into each.

As we clear our palettes, we might send unorthodox birthday greetings to Otto Gross; he was born on this date in 1877. A psychoanalyst by training (he was an early disciple of Freud), Gross became a champion of an early form of anti-psychiatry (“depth psychology“) and sexual liberation, and an anarchist. His impact on psychology was limited (though Jung claimed that Gross “changed [his] entire worldview”); but he was an important influence on D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and other artists– including the founders of Berlin Dada.